Magic Kettle

Windows games on your Apple Silicon Mac. Double-click the .exe and play.

Magic Kettle runs Windows games on Apple Silicon Macs and does all the setup itself: it works out what the game needs, finds the settings it runs best with and remembers them. No bottles, no prefixes, no Wine settings, no Windows to install. Free and open source.

Download · Website · macOS 15 or later · Apple Silicon

What it runs

• DirectX 9, 10, 11 and 12. Magic Kettle reads the game and picks how to draw it on Metal (DXMT, DXVK or WineD3D), trying the next one if the first fails. DirectX 12 games run on Apple's D3DMetal, which you add from Apple yourself in a couple of minutes.
• Steam and the Epic Games Store, installed with one button. Their games install, sign in and start as on Windows.
• Unity, RPG Maker XP/VX/VX Ace, NW.js and Electron games, and games that need Visual C++ or .NET: Magic Kettle installs those from Microsoft only when a game needs them.
• Installers and disc images, BIN/CUE included, and old games that ask for their CD.
• Old and small games made bigger, smoothly, without switching your Mac's display; fixed-size windows can be stretched by their corner.
• Japanese games start with the right language and fonts.

All games share one profile, so saves stay put. Nothing about you or your games is sent anywhere, and every download is checked against a pinned SHA-256.

Install

1. Download MagicKettle-<version>.zip from Releases, open it and move Magic Kettle to Applications.
2. Open Magic Kettle. The first time, macOS says it can't verify the app and doesn't open it: Magic Kettle is free and isn't notarized by Apple, which needs a paid developer account. Click Done.
3. Open System Settings › Privacy & Security, scroll down to Security and click Open Anyway next to Magic Kettle, then confirm. macOS remembers this; from then on Magic Kettle opens like any other app.

Or, in Terminal, once:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Magic Kettle.app"

On its first start Magic Kettle downloads what Windows games need (Wine, DXVK, DXMT), once, with a progress bar.

Use

Double-click a game's .exe in Finder, drop its folder on Magic Kettle, or run its installer with Magic Kettle. The first launch tries settings until the game runs well; after that the game simply starts from the library.

How it works

Magic Kettle runs games on its own build of Wine 11.20, made and released by MagicKettle-Runtime: with osync, our in-process synchronization (9 to 26 times faster than wineserver on our benchmarks), and fixes for Rosetta 2, Steam, the Epic Games Launcher, game controllers, stretched windows and D3DMetal. Settings for particular games come as data from MagicKettle-Games. The design is in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md (in Russian).

Building

Needs macOS 15+, Apple Silicon and Xcode 16+.

swift test                 # MagicKettleKit and CLI tests, no Wine needed
swift run kettle help      # debugging CLI
brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate          # creates MagicKettle.xcodeproj from project.yml
open MagicKettle.xcodeproj

Support the project

Magic Kettle is free. If it runs a game you love, you can say thanks in crypto. Send each coin only over the network named next to it.

• BTC (Bitcoin): bc1qhz50yan4knlkdfy4dm4amu0p052k5rc9fz7xqr
• USDT (TRC-20, Tron): TQ3Sh1qZA2RCargeKuE5NwcVHVpNSn2Skj
• ETH (Ethereum, Arbitrum One, Base): 0xc481b1f2cE5B8F56C7EFc9dF9F320E68b71DeCC4
• GRAM (TON): UQB8NW4c48kR0L1oTvseprwP2NHIJpEPAHPkgp8yRaIfU69n

License

Apache-2.0. Wine, DXVK, DXMT and Wine Mono are downloaded separately under their own licenses. D3DMetal is Apple's software: Magic Kettle never ships or downloads it.